We all love the holiday season, its time of the year to celebrate what you have and spend quality time with friends and family. It’s a great time for marketers too. Shoppers would be out in the street searching for their next buy. To catch these hot leads, you need an excellent marketing strategy and channel.
How to Increase Sales During Holidays?
One thing is sure in holidays, if you don’t make your touch noteworthy, someone else will have customers’ attention even before you finish! So make sure to add something that captures their attention. Here are three themes you can leverage.
1) Offer what they look for
Discounts, Prizes, decreased rates etc. dominate customers psych in this season. Moreover, no holiday campaign is over without a proper holiday offer for the customers. Customers hold off their purchases in anticipation of this offer. This is the reason why you see huge sales every holiday session. Holiday offers give you a vast demographic that is eagerly waiting to hear from you! What more can a marketer want?
2) Make it about them.
No, they don’t want to hear from you. (unless you are selling candies, of course) No one wants to pick marketing calls on New year eve. But they would surely appreciate a holiday greeting.
3) Send Gifts
Show appreciation for your partners, send them a gift in the form of a coupon or free credits. This not only builds goodwill but gets the dice rolling come when the business resumes post-holidays.
Now that you have an inkling of what you will be talking about, it’s time to figure out how.
How to reach your leads this Christmas?
Let us understand all the usual marketing channels that you would be using to reach your customers.
The average open rate of emails is 10-15%. Open rates for emails drop significantly on holidays. And since it is a free channel, it gets flooded pretty fast. So even if your leads checked their inboxes, your message would have low chances of being opened.
Paid Campaigns
Advertisements are a pain even on regular days, be it the short video popping before a youtube video or a social media post of a product you searched. Advertisement loses its punch near the holidays because we are constantly bombarded with information about offers and sales.
Banners and Posters
Why in the right mind would someone encourage you to use a channel that is as old (if not older) as the word marketing?
The answer is simple, targeting, and ROI. Yes, of course, you can use that billboard exactly where your clients are bound to see. But how many such perfect billboards will you be able to find? What if you have clients spread thinly over a vast region? What about the cost of acquiring a customer.
Unless you are into entertainment, fashion, or any other sector catering to a huge (and we mean it) demographic, this channel is bound to burn through lead gen budget before any substantial returns are generated.
Text Messaging
The text message is the perfect service to reach your clients on Holidays. Rich Text Message is a complete tool to share everything you need your customers to see and respond to. Unlike emails, it sees high open rates that do not dip in Christmas break. You have the freedom to customize and embed smart objects (pictures, links, geolocation, etc.)
This is the only channel sturdy enough to get your message precisely to your leads when all other avenues fail.
6 Key Features to trust Rich Text Messaging with your New Year Campaign.
1. Text Open Rates
Rich Text messaging see consistently high open rates throughout the whole year. RTM has the highest open rates compared to any other mobile message method, including Facebook messenger and WhatsApp.
2. Immediate Notifications
Notifications play a huge role in sales today, so much so that “Notification Marketing” is a thing! Bulk Messaging wins this game since all messages worldwide have an instant notification on receiving a text message.
3. Send Scannable
RTM offers you the ability to send hassle-free coupons in the form of QR codes. Redeeming coupons was never this easy, scan it – get it!
4. Send Empathy
Nothing shows your appreciation more than a custom made audio/video message to your clients. Show and spread the love this festive season.
5. Content Spinning
Rich Text Messaging also supports content spinning, say goodbye to your content woes. Try, reuse, modify multiple templates without the repercussions of sending out the same text to your clients.
6. Auto-Responder
You have a 24×7 available artificial agent to reply to all the triggers of your lead. Respond to signups even in the middle of the night.
So Text message is an obviously shortlisted as your channel, Now it’s time to develop a marketing strategy.
Five things your new year Text Messaging Campaign strategy must-have.
1. Timing
Your strategy must have this down to every minute detail. A timely, reached message will drive results more efficiently and increase conversions.
2. Guide on when to start and stop
This is a very crucial part of your strategy as it limits the amount of touch with your leads. That, in turn, prevents you from being a pest.
3. Augmentation
You can use Text messaging as a standalone campaign or augment traffic in other campaigns by redirecting the leads using short links in the text itself.
4. Onboarding
Drive lead onboarding or signups with lucrative incentives they get for opting-in.
5. Targeting
Segment and separate your leads on different criteria and customize your messaging to drive more conversions.
Samples scripts to get you started
Sales
“Hi John, thanks for opting in for our sales text! Are you available for a few minutes today to discuss exciting new year deals for you? – Peter @ LeadsRain”
Greeting
“Hey Paul, It’s Peter, Wishing you a very Happy New Year! I look forward to another year of our partnership.”
Follow-Up
“Hey Laura, Have you been through your quotations? Let us know soon so we can get started.”
Offers
“Happy New Year Sam!!! Here our gift for you. Get 10% off on every purchase today by logging into your account!
tinyurl.com/ssqqy45”
Text Messaging service is the only channel that will connect you to your leads and scalable enough to cover them all. Sign up for our text messaging services and get free credits to test your text messaging campaign. Happy Holidays!
